i think there's a misunderstanding about what audio SCIENCE review is all about
its not a place where people are all that appreciative of so called 'real world experiences' because all that is is that its a single anecdote
ANY piece of equipment can work will for *some* people in *some* circumstances... there's literally no value to that kind of discussion, there's no way to test for it, there's no science behind it.
People seem to forget that even subjective audio reviews can be of limited value... hence the objectivists who go on about abx testing.
Its like saying I bought a Lamborghini Urus... it works fine dropping kids off at school and taking the shopping... that's real world use isn't it?
yeah but that's not the point. The emphasis is on power and torque and 0-60 and quarter miles and terminal velocity which is like you know, the graphs...
again, if a Urus SUV does 230hp per wheel but only for 35 secs and then it drops down to 20hp per wheel and then people say... "oh this works fine when I drive to work"... some owners would have to inject the copium and say 'this is fine'.
if I bought such a piece of equipment I'd have different thoughts but hey... if you're happy, you're happy, you dont have to try to convince people who wouldnt touch a $1,699 20w amp.
Actually - when you have a "population" of anecdotes, that align - that is a scientific and measurable approach - it is how the Harman curves were developed... a bunch of subjective anecdotes!
Yes a single subjective data point, is not meaningful, but a forum full of anecdotes which display a trend - that is indeed meaningful.
What that meaning is - is a topic requiring further investigation - but yes you can measure it, and then, like any measurement, you need to determine what exactly it implies/means.
On one side we have amirm with his very well regarded engineering tests on a lab bench, on the other side we have a large community of owners, that have not experienced the issue that Amir has measured, in actual live use, in the field.
Another important data point, is that this behaviour (on the lab test bench) has been consistent across 3 generations of AVR's and across two tiers (lower and upper, LX30x and LX50x/RZ50)
As has been Onkyo/Pioneer/Integra's practice over many years, many of the main circuit boards (including amps, DSP, DAC's and HDMI boards) are shared within the tiers... and the overall design is shared between the tiers as well.
Clearly, this design DOES power limit under specific stress conditions - clearly most of us consider the thresholds for that limiting to be far too restrictive to meet our expectations of what an amp in this price bracket should be capable of.
However, having said all that - we have a massive number of happy consumers of these products with no (or almost no?) reports of limiting in the field, in real live use.
At this stage, the tests done by Amirm are insufficient to make real conclusions about the parameters that trigger the nanny circuit.
It is also worthy of note, that most buyers of this family of AVR's who are aware that their speakers are "difficult"/demanding of the amps, run external amps, as they do not believe these AVR's to be sufficiently robust to handle such speakers. (I am one of these)
And therefore to some degree, in field use of these AVR's users are self selecting out those setups most likely to trigger protection circuits.
This is definitely a question that should be raised with Onkyo/Integra/Pioneer - Voxx-Sharp/PAC - as the answer would only be available from the design engineers... (who may be gagged by marketing...)
) answer. If I buy a Pioneer 505 and add a 3-channel Purify amplifier to the LCR and the internal amplifiers will only be used for 2x surround and 2x atmos and push it to the max, can the protection be activated? More precisely, does the protection monitor the performance of the internal preamplifiers and the real, small performance of the amplifiers used for surround and atmos?
